Faber and Faber

»An Expert in Murder» is the first in a brilliant and original new series which features crime writer Josephine Tey as its lead character. It is March 1934, and Josephine is travelling from Scotland to London for the final week of her celebrated play Richard of Bordeaux — but joy turns to horror when her arrival coincides with murder. Detective Inspector Archie Penrose is convinced that the killing is connected to the play. Richard of Bordeaux has been the surprise hit of the season, with pacifist themes which strike a chord in a world still haunted by war, but now it seems that Josephine could become the victim of her own success, as her reputation — and even her life — are put at risk. A second murder confirms Penrose’s suspicions that somewhere among this flamboyant theatre set is a ruthless and spiteful killer. As his investigations lead him from the romance of the West End to the stark reality of the trenches, he and Josephine must confront their own ghosts in a search for someone who will stop at nothing to right the wrongs of a past generation. Cleverly blending elements of the Golden Age author’s real life with a fictional murder mystery, «An Expert in Murder» is both a tribute to one of the most enduringly popular writers of crime and a richly atmospheric detective novel in its own right.

A Russian woman named Lara arrives in Afghanistan at the house of Marcus Caldwell, an Englishman and widower living in the shadow of the Tora Bora mountains. Marcus' daughter, Zameen, may have known Lara's brother, a Soviet soldier who disappeared in the area many years previously. But like Marcus' wife, Zameen is dead; a victim of the age in which she was born. In the days that follow, further people arrive at the house: two Americans who have spent much of their adult lives in the area; a young Afghan teacher; and a radicalized young man intent on his own path. And Nadeem Aslam paints a moving, beautiful and powerful portrait of a land and a people torn apart through love and war.

Meet the water bears that can live in suspension for hundreds of years, the parasite carried by your cat that makes men grumpy and women promiscuous, and the woodlouse that drinks through its bottom. Marvel at elephants that walk on tiptoe, the pigs that shine in the dark, and the woodpeckers that have ears on the end of their tongues. From the team that brought ignorance to millions, a Christmas bestseller — full of illuminating illustrations, maps and diagrams — shrunk down to a pocket-friendly, easily-searchable, portability-considerate size.

Presents a compendium of popular misconceptions, misunderstandings and common mistakes based on common knowledge, culled from the fields of history, science, literature, and biography. How much do we really know about anything? As someone else once said, it isn't what you don't know that does you harm, it's what you know that's wrong. The Book of General Ignorance sets out to show you how much of what you know is wrong, incorrect, piffle, nonsense. Now with added ignorance, this massive bestseller from Stephen Fry and the rest of the QI team is finally out in paperback. If, like Alan Davies, you still think the Henry VII had six wives, the earth has only one moon, that George Washington was the first president of the USA, that Bangkok is the capital of Thailand, that the largest living thing is a blue whale, that Alexander Graeme Bell invented the telephone, that whisky and bagpipes come from Scotland or that Mount Everest is the world's tallest mountain, then there are at least 200 reasons why this is the book for you. About John Lloyd John Mitchinson: John Lloyd was the producer of Not The Nine O'Clock News, Spitting Image and Blackadder. He started The News Quiz, Quote... Unquote, The News Huddlines and To The Manor Born and played a key role in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and Mr Bean, shooting TV commercials in his spare time. For most of the 1980s he went without lunch and slept for four hours a night. He won an absurd number of prizes and got very, very tired. John Mitchinson started off in publishing where he was the marketing manager of Waterstone's. Combining his skills with John Lloyd meant that opening a bookshop in the QI building was inevitable. John is a man who likes to read, eat and drink, and who now gets paid to do all three simultaneously.

This is the third great QI Annual written, drawn, photographed and lavishly blu-tacked together by the many writers, performers and brains from the BBC1 TV series, including: Stephen Fry, Alan Davies, Rowan Atkinson, Jeremy Clarkson, Bill Bailey, Jo Brand, Phill Jupitus, Jimmy Carr and many more.

The third book in Jason Goodwin's celebrated series takes Yashim from the winding alleyways of Istanbul to the decaying grandeur of Venice. Charged by the Sultan to find a stolen painting by Bellini, he enlists the help of his friend Palewski, the Polish Ambassador, and goes undercover. Venice in 1840 is a city of empty palazzos and silent canals, and Palewski starts to mingle with Venetian dealers — self-made men, faded aristocrats and the hedonistic Contessa. But when two bodies turn up in the canal, he realises that art in Venice is a deadly business. And meanwhile, what has happened to Yashim? «The Bellini Card» is a thrilling adventure in which a quest for a lost painting turns into dangerous game of cat and mouse that threatens to destroy the Ottoman throne and overturn the balance of power in Europe.

In his highly acclaimed debut, A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. Retreating into the past, she finds herself reliving one particular hot summer in Nagasaki, when she and her friends struggled to rebuild their lives after the war. But then as she recalls her strange friendship with Sachiko — a wealthy woman reduced to vagrancy — the memories take on a disturbing cast.

Two men are massacred in an expensive Moscow bar. But the bullets miss their target: Alexei Volkovoy — Volk for short. He's a deadly, battle-hardened veteran of Russia's brutal war in Chechnya, and he serves two masters: Maxim, a psychotic mafia kingpin; and a military man known only as the General. By his side is Valya, an exotic beauty and the most dangerous weapon in Volk's arsenal. Together they are commissioned to steal a long-lost masterpiece from St Petersburg's Hermitage Museum. Volk must choose which powerful man he will betray in order to escape with the painting and with his life. Volk's Game announces Alexei Volkovoy as the boldest, most unforgettable hero of a new generation.

Anthony is a British journalist whose American wife, Lucy, has suddenly died. Grieving and haunted, he becomes obsessed with her youth and the years he missed before he met her. To find out more, he travels to a remote part of the Nevada desert to meet Lucy's first husband. Their encounter is the beginning of a journey that takes him across the world, to the edge of madness, and into the corners of the human heart. It is a journey in which he is never at peace and never far from the woman he still loves.

Peter Carey's novel of the undeclared love between clergyman Oscar Hopkins and the heiress Lucinda Leplastrier is both a moving and beautiful love story and a historical tour de force. Made for each other, the two are gamblers — one obsessive, the other compulsive — incapable of winning at the game of love.

Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as 'Lily' in Lima in 1950, where she claims to be from Chile but vanishes the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris as 'Comrade Arlette', an activist en route to Cuba, an icy, remote lover who denies knowing anything about the Lily of years gone by. Whoever the bad girl turns up as and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her. Gifted liar and irresistible, maddening muse — does Ricardo ever know who she really is?

Set in London in 1989, the year of the fatwah and the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is a thriller with a background of raves, ecstasy, religious ferment and sexual passion. By the author of «The Buddha of Suburbia» and «Sammy and Rosie Get Laid»..

Juxtaposes two tales about mothers, trans-sexuality, kitchens, love, tragedy, and the terms they all come to in the minds of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan.

Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J.R.R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. With dazzling energy and insight, Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous lives of Oscar and his family and their attempts to find love and belonging. Rendered with uncommon warmth and humour, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an exciting and completely original first novel from Junot Diaz.

Venetia Aldridge QC is a distinguished barrister. When she agrees to defend Garry Ashe, accused of the brutal murder of his aunt, it is one more opportunity to triumph in her career as a criminal lawyer. But just four weeks later, Miss Aldridge is found dead. Commander Adam Dalgliesh, called in to investigate, finds motives for murder among the clients Venetia has defended, her professional colleagues, her family — even her lover. As Dalgliesh narrows the field of suspects, a second brutal murder draws them into greater complexities of intrigue and evil.

Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose; to explore thoroughly the great, themes of existence.

After a shooting in London goes hideously wrong, two hitmen, Ray and Ken, are sent to hide out in the strange, Gothic, medieval town of Bruges, Belgium, by their volatile and dangerous boss, Harry Waters. While awaiting instructions from him as to what to do next, the pair attempt to deal with their feelings over the botched killing.

In July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners' minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Obama called the audacity of hope. The Audacity of Hope is Barack Obama's call for a different brand of politics — a politics for those weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the endless clash of armies we see in congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of our improbable experiment in democracy. He explores those forces — from the fear of losing to the perpetual need to raise money to the power of the media — that can stifle even the best-intentioned politician. He also writes, with surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment. At the heart of this book is Barack Obama's vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. He examines the growing economic insecurity of American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threat — from terrorism to pandemic — that gather beyond our shores. And he grapples with the role that faith plays in a democracy — where it is vital and where it must never intrude. Underlying his stories about family, friends, and members of the Senate is a vigorous search for connection: the foundation for a radically hopeful political consensus. A public servant and a lawyer, a professor and a father, a Christian and a skeptic, and above all a student of history and human nature, Barack Obama has written a book of transforming power. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution, he says, can Americans repair a political process that is broken, and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there, he writes — waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.

The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama was only two years old when his father walked out on the family. Many years later, Obama receives a phone call from Nairobi: his father is dead. This sudden news inspires an emotional odyssey for Obama, determined to learn the truth of his father's life and reconcile his divided inheritance. Written at the age of thirty-three, Dreams from My Father is an unforgettable read. It illuminates not only Obama's journey, but also our universal desire to understand our history, and what makes us the people we are.

The latest volume in the glorious bestiary «Flanimals» features the prolific class of flying, crawling invertebrates collectively known as Blugs. There are an endless variety of Movs, Bants and Zubs. The metamorphosis from Monk Worm to Frag Drier. And the evil incarnate that is the Bletchling. It is compulsive bedtime reading for children and disturbed adults alike. Night, night. And mind the Blugs don't bite.

A parable about love, literature and fanaticism. A young university student becomes obsessed with a magical book that delves into the dangerous natures of love and self. Abandoning his studies and his family, he goes with the beautiful Janan on a search for the meaning of the book`s darker secrets.

Presented in handy pocket-size, this title catalogues the various misconceptions, mistakes and misunderstandings in «common knowledge» that can make you wonder why anyone bothers going to school.

Presents a compendium of popular misconceptions, misunderstandings and common mistakes culled from the hit BBC show, QI. This title sets out to show you that a lot of what you think you know is wrong.

Three children are massacred in their beds. The crushed corpse of their mother is discovered in a dockside warehouse. Then the husband, Bruno Gottewald, is dead and buried — killed while out on field manoeuvres. In less than a week, the entire Gottewald family has been wiped off the face of the earth. A tragic coincidence? Or are the invading French army using the massacre to expand their power? Hanno Stiffeniis, a Prussian magistrate, goes to investigate the deaths, seeking to discover how the crime was committed and the motive behind the massacre. But only Hanno's wife, Helena, knows what truly happened in that cottage in the woods...